Shadows of Carcosa

Book excerpt: From the fictional land of Carcosa that inspired the HBO show True Detective to H. P. Lovecraft’s accursed New England hills, this collection features some of the most legendary landscapes of the cosmic horror genre. The collection includes the following twelve stories: Edgar Allan Poe, "MS. Found in a Bottle" Bram Stoker, "The Squaw" Ambrose Bierce, "Moxon's Master" Ambrose Bierce, "The Damned Thing" Ambrose Bierce, "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" R. W. Chambers, "The Repairer of Reputations" M. P. Shiel, "The House of Sounds" Arthur Machen, "The White People" Algernon Blackwood, "The Willows" Henry James, "The Jolly Corner" Walter de la Mare, "Seaton's Aunt" H. P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space" “The true weird tale has something more than a secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains. An atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; a hint of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”—H. P. Lovecraft